The evil one is...you’ll find out.

Posted on 2017.11.05 at 21:38

Here is Hawaii's new riddle:

A family lives in a circular house. One day, the mother comes home, and she finds that the baby is dead. She asks the dad, but he says, "I was watching TV." She asks the butler, but he says, "I was counting my money." She asks the maid, but she says, "I was sweeping the corners." Who killed the baby?

If you answered, "what the FUCK, why isn't everyone in a FULL-BLOWN PANIC at the dead baby?!?!" you're correct! It was the maid, because round houses don't have corners to sweep! Nailed it.

Also it has made me reconfigure "who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?" as "who killed the baby from the baby jar?" Not me!

...

I had two instances this week of people being complete and utter dicks to me, both times when Ace urgently needed to use the bathroom. Originally I planned to recount the details of both here, but it makes me too overwhelmed to dredge up the details and rehash them.

They were both EGREGIOUS. In the second, I paused and told the haircut woman, "We're next on the waitlist, and we're here! My daughter just needs to use the bathroom real quick," and when I came back, the stylist was cutting the next person's hair. I was like, "What gives?!" and she told me it was their policy that if you don't answer when they call your name, they go on to the next person.

BUT! Then she and the customer had this outrageous conversation about no-shows, and how this is like the doctor's office, and how I'm lucky I wasn't charged a no-show fee...I'm getting irate all over again. I think I need to stop telling this story; there's not much more to it, anyway. I talked to the manager; I was not placated.

The first was trying to find a bathroom while we were trick or treating. We were just stranded, far away from the house of anyone we knew, and my four year old needs to pee, and I've also got Rascal. Why are people such assholes? Specifically that one guy who was confrontational and mean about it?

SERENITY NOW. SERENITY NOW.

Look, a singular autumnal tree!

That's better.

On Monday, I dreamt of a long line of kids in Halloween costumes. They were snaked around buildings, not moving, and I was getting more and more agitated until I woke, agitated because my stomach hurt terribly. It's like the line of kids was my intestines, in knots, bulging and not moving.

I was in groggy agony for the next two hours, and then I puked a lot, and then slept soundly for the rest of the night. It was all very strange. I was a little shaky the next day, and then life went on.

On Halloween proper, it poured rain and cut trick-or-treating short. Jammies and I did not dress up this year.

Neither did Ace nor Rascal.

On Wednesday, Ace and Rascal had their first soccer practice!

Jammies was coaching,

Ickle was crew,

and Tickle served coffee and mulligan stew,

as Pokey got to be the big kid helper, and I took tiny photos from far away, and then cropped and zoomed them into fuzzy oblivion.

When it was time to scrimmage, Jammies gave a big pep talk about which way you're supposed to run, and who is on your same team, and whether you can touch the ball with your hands. Rascal ran in circles and shadow boxed.

The first thirty seconds of the scrimmage went great! Then this happened:

Rascal is the orange blur in the middle. Ace is not a blur, because she's not running. She's holding Jammies' shorts and walking next to him.

She walked everywhere with him, holding his shorts.

At the break, Jammies took a knee. Ace gripped Jammies' beard in both of her hands, and looked him in the eye and said, "I thought this would be fun. But it is BORING."

Then she went and sat by me for the remainder of practice. The end!

...

And then Saturday was the first game!

Ace at her first soccer game:

She did play after all! A little.

Pokey at his first soccer game:

Pokey did not play. The basketball courts are loud and echoey when they're crowded for the games, and they use the super-loud basketball buzzer. It's hard on the little kids. Rascal bailed altogether for my lap.

Ace played, but unenthusiastically. After one five minute period, she said she was done. But then Hawaii bribed her, and Ace went out for a second turn near the end of the game.

How did Hawaii bribe Ace? "I promised her that I'd sing her ten Taylor Swift songs. Like, on the couch, with my hairbrush for a microphone." Seems fair.

....

This is our new coffee table, which is my grandmother's coffee table that my mother wanted to stay in the family. They bought it in maybe Norway? or Finland? maybe 50 years ago? I should really get my facts straight on this coffee table.

.....

Here is an idea for a children's book:

"Mom, look!" said Ace, "A yellow chicken!" [Illustration of a person on the sidewalk, dressed like a chicken with sandwich board.]"Neat!" said Mom, "Do you think it's a real chicken?" [self-evidently not]"It's like that pink monkey we saw that time!" said Ace."Do you think they're friends," asked Mom, "Pink Monkey and Yellow Chicken?""Can we write a story about them?" said Ace.

That is a conversation that we had in the car, and I thought it would be a charming meta-story if we then composed a story of the Adventures of Pink Monkey and Yellow Chicken, and it was told as if it were being made up in real time by the characters Ace and Mom, story-in-a-story style.

So when we got home, I pulled out my computer and asked Ace to tell me the story of the Pink Monkey and the Yellow Chicken, and I transcribed (and described) as she talked:

“First they were little kids. It has to start out when they were little,” said Ace. “And then when they grew up, they became friends."

“And when they grew up, they were very very very very best friends. Okay read me what we have so far!

“They actually met another little kid, and the little kid, he was just dressed up as their old friend who actually is not their friend anymore. He was really mean.

He was very awful. But how he became mean was very very mean.""How did he become mean?" asked Mom."You’re going to find out! At the end of the story!"

"And how he became mean was: he was once a good friend, but there was once an evil snake, and it bit him, and he became very very evil."

"What does this have to do with pink monkey and yellow chicken?" asked Mom."Those two kids ARE THE PINK MONKEY AND YELLOW CHICKEN!"

"So wait, which one is evil?""The evil one is...you’ll find out. The evil one is actually their mom and dad."

"Ok mom, I have to tell you what the story is actually about," Ace levelled. "So they were actually evil, and the kid that we were talking about was their younger brother. But when they crossed to the good side, they forgot about him. So when they met him, they didn’t recognize him because they forgot about being evil. So the parents say, “make an evil plan and make them evil again,” because when they were on the evil side, the good always lose, but when they turned good, there were only three people on the bad side, so they’d always lose. Now what does this all say, starting from the beginning?"